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The file-sharing service music nerds still mourn: a website where you queued songs, a tiny program called Satellite that kept hunting for them while you were away, and forums that turned strangers into Italian-prog-rock experts. Audiogalaxy rose when Napster fell in 2001 and went dark on June 17, 2002, the day it settled with the record industry.
The bear on the desktop, the search box full of misspelled MP3s, and the toolbar nobody remembered installing. Free Peers' BearShare rode the Gnutella network from December 2000 until a $30 million settlement with the record labels ended it in 2006, and in a lot of houses it was the reason the family computer got slow.
The file-sharing client that outlived Napster and became Japan's favorite: queue positions, upload slots, a couple thousand chat rooms and a network that refused to die. When the RIAA shut its maker down in September 2005, two community patches had the whole thing back online within days, and the patched network kept running for years.